I’ve been super-duper-crazy busy lately with freelance work. I’ve had several large projects on my plate for a while now, and the deadlines are all converging within the next two weeks. With freelancing everything seems to happen at once. Illustrator Tom Richmond put it well on his blog:

“Part of the problem with freelancing is that you never know when the next phone call will be your last for a while. As a result, you tend to take on more work than is good for you, for fear of a possible dry spell just around the corner.”

I’m getting better at dealing with it though. In the last couple of weeks I’ve actually turned down a couple of projects, something I very rarely do.

Here’s a few of the many balls I have in the air…

First, some spot illustrations for a children’s book I am doing for Living Waters Publications:

Some character design concepts for a bumbling pig character:

Turn-around drawings for a rubber pig promotional toy:

Some character design concepts of a smart cow for a dairy company:

And finally, some character designs for the re-design of a hardware store mascot:

In addition, I’ve got three other projects in the works. Two are still in the very early stages and the third has a Non-Disclosure Agreement attached, so I can’t show you anything….yet.

I’ve been pretty swamped with freelance work, but here’s a peek into one of my current projects. It’s a children’s book for Scholastic. I was asked to totally re-design an existing character, a young boy shark. Here are a few of the exploratory sketches I did that led up to the final design on the right. This one is a bit of a challenge because the shark has to be able to stand upright like a person, but also swim horizontally like a real shark. Also, since the shark is a lemon shark, I thought it might be fun to give him lemon-ish colors. But ultimately the client asked me to use the same colors from the previous artist’s design.

I’ll be finishing up the book in a couple of weeks and will let you know when it is available for sale.

Here’s a short but sweet interview with Peter de Seve about his sketchbook. I own a copy and it is incredible stuff. De Seve’s work is amazing. Besides being one of the world’s most sought-after illustrators, de Seve has also done character design work for movies such as A Bug’s Life, Prince of Egypt, and Ice Age. His website is well worth a visit.

This week’s topic for Illustration Friday is “Under the Sea”. I created this illustration last year for Standard Publishing as a poster to be used in Sunday School classrooms (text was later added by the client).